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Comet: Making The Web a 2-Way Medium Joe Walker, DWR Lead Developer
| Date post: | 15-Jan-2015 |
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Technology |
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Comet: Making The Web a 2-Way MediumJoe Walker, DWR Lead Developer
What is Comet?
Long lived HTTP connections
•Low latency data
•For events outside the browser
Agenda:
Use Cases
Techniques
Technologies
Demos
Why?
Ajax made individual pages interactive places to explore
More and more of the data on the web is social and therefore changing
Why?
Time people spend on a
page
Time before a page
changes
Evolution of the Web
Why?
Simply keeping a page up to date is easy: poll
But polling kills servers
Comet keeps pages up to date *efficiently*
But ...
It’s a hack - the web is biased against it
Does that stop us?
Ajax is also a hack, but that hasn’t stopped it
And Comet does work
Examples of Comet
Chat is everywhere: GMail, Meebo, Yahoo Mail, etc.
GMail uses it to update email conversations
Google Docs uses it to show you other collaborators actions
yes.com uses it to track radio station playlists
Polar Rose are using it for delayed photo recognition
GPokr is using it for online gaming
etc...
Agenda:
Use Cases
Techniques
Technologies
Demos
Client Tricks
Maximum of 2 connections per browser per host
•Coordination using window.name in the client
•or cookies using a server
•or use multi-home DNS
HTTP streaming is download only (chunked mode)
TCP connections are kept alive under HTTP 1.1
Server detection of failed connections
Client How-to: Forever Frame
Client posts an iframe which doesn’t close quickly
•Send text/plain and poll in browser (not IE)
•Send text/plain with 4k whitespace to flush IE
•Flush with a <script> tag for each data block
The iframe will need killing and restarting to avoid memory leak
But IE clicks when iframe starts
Client How-to: Long Polling
Client makes an XHR request which does not return immediately
IE disallows reading XHR.responseText until connection is closed
Although you can keep XHR frames open forever, generally you poll
Client How-to: htmlfile
‘htmlfile’ is an ActiveX control like XHR: htmlfile = new ActiveXObject("htmlfile"); htmlfile.open(); htmlfile.write("<html><iframe src='javascript:void(0)' onload='cleanup();'></iframe></html>"); htmlfile.close(); htmlfile.parentWindow.dwr = dwr;
Avoids ‘clicking’, but doesn’t work in IE/Server 2003
Not supported in Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.
Client How-to: Callback Polling
Create <script> blocks pointing to any domain
Create new script block when last completes
Client How-to: Other Options
Mime Messaging:
•Uses Multipart Mime in HTML: x-multipart-replace
•Not in IE
•Excellent performance
Flash
•We probably have enough other options that we don’t need to get into plugins
Server Tricks
Watch out for stream-stoppers
•Apache: mod_jk
•Buggy network proxies
•Various application firewalls
Watch out for thread starvation
Agenda:
Use Cases
Techniques
Technologies
Demos
Saving you the Pain
On the Server :
•Jetty, Twisted Python, Grizzly, Lighttpd, Perbal
Event Buses
•Cometd, mod_pubsub, mod_repubsub, Lightstreamer, KnowHow, HAppS
Frameworks
•DWR, Juggernaut, Nevow
Bayeux
Standard Protocol for Interoperable Comet
Supported by:
•Cometd, Jetty, Dojo, DWR and servers in development from BEA, IBM and Sun
Bayeux on the Client via Cometd
Dojo client implementation:dojox.cometd.init(serverUrl);dojox.cometd.publish("/topic", {/* payload */});dojox.cometd.subscribe("/topic", function(){/* ... */ });
Bayeux on the Server
package dojox.cometd;
public interface Bayeux{ Client newClient(String idprefix, Listener listener);
void publish(Client fromClient, String toChannel, Object data, String msgId);
void subscribe(String toChannel, Client subscriber);
...}
DWR
Reverse Ajax == Comet + Polling + Piggyback
(It’s just a configuration option)
Allowing the server to easily manage groups of users
DWR, Reverse Ajax
DWR calling remote JavascriptCollection sessions = context.getScriptSessionsByPage(url);
ScriptProxy proxy = new ScriptProxy(sessions);proxy.addFunctionCall("updateCallers", calls);
DWR, Reverse Ajax
DWR calling remote Script.aculo.usCollection sessions = context.getScriptSessionsByPage(url);
Effect e = new Effect(sessions);e.fade("client-id");
DWR, Reverse Ajax
DWR calling remote TIBCO GICollection sessions = context.getScriptSessionsByPage(url);
Server server = GI.getServer(sessions, "appname");Button button = server.getJSXById("button", Button.class);button.setEnabled(Form.STATEDISABLED, true);
Bayeux Performance
Agenda:
Use Cases
Techniques
Technologies
Demos
Demo
http://www.webtide.com/sessionRater/
Demo
Questions?
http://cometdaily.com/http://cometd.com/
http://getahead.org/blog/joe/http://directwebremoting.org/
